Kevin: BusinessWeek teases out the New York Times dismal first quarter with results coming in below analysts estimates. The revenue was $22m below consensus estimates. "The disappointing performance was driven by a nearly $124 million decline in the Times Co.'s ad revenue from the same time last year. While most of the erosion was concentrated in the Times Co.'s newspapers, its Internet ad revenue also sagged by 8 percent, or $3.6 million."

Kevin: Patricio Robles dissects pollster Mark Penn's numbers in a Wall Street Journal article claiming that there are more professional bloggers in the US than lawyers. I have to say that I was a bit sceptical of the numbers, and Patricio finds them wanting. Penn's biggest problem is mixing statistics and studies, but Penn also writes the piece in such a way that it leads the casual reader to believe that the number of paid up bloggers comes from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. I will wait to see if Penn or the Wall Street Journal responds.

Kevin: This is an interesting post from 2002 by Tim O'Reilly about piracy. In 2009, I suspect that has got renewed attention in light of The Pirate Bay verdict in Sweden. Tim lists several lessons from the file-sharing wars including: Lesson 1: Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy. and Lesson 3: Customers want to do the right thing, if they can.

Kevin: Hat Tip to Nieman Labs for tweeting this. Erica Smith, designer and programmer, has an excellent graphic to help editors think about the kind of graphic they should create for a given set of data. It's such a simple but powerful chart.

Kevin: The headline says it all. The New York Times sees continued erosion of advertising in this recession, leading to a $61.6m for Q1 2009. The Business Insider breaks down the numbers.

Kevin: Mathew Ingram calls on newspapers to think more creatively as Google News launches a feature that allows you to navigate news by time. He asks: "One question kept nagging at me as I was looking at this latest Google effort at delivering the news, and that was: Why couldn’t a news organization have done this?" This has been done, back in 2007 by El Comercio in Peru. But I still take his point. There is a lot of room in innovation in all parts of the newspaper business, both on the editorial side and the commercial side.